No school for the kids today or maybe even for the next week or so. Just two days after school started out here, Huber Heights teachers went on strike starting today after not being able to reach an agreement with the school board about teachers’ pay and benefits. I agree that the teachers need to be compensated accordingly although my main concern regarding this is my children. I’m sure there are some kids here that are thinking, “Strike? No school? Woo hoo!” Honestly, my children want to go to school. They have been looking forward to going back all summer. Abigail is supposed to be starting preschool next week. Heck, she’s been excited about going to school ever since she found out that was where the boys were going every day. She’s even had her backpack (pink princesses, of course) picked out a whole year before she was allowed to go.

Now the kids will be delayed for a week or so. When this is all settled, those days missed will probably need to be made up at the end of the year, shortening their summer break. In the meantime, Mandy said that she’ll try to supplement with some learning materials we have at home. I hope they can reach an agreement soon. “Think of the children!”

“Ding dong” went the door bell this evening. I was greeted, if that’s what it was intended as, with some teenager (I think) getting all defensive saying, “Hey now, I’m not here startin’ any trouble!” I’m taken aback but she starts her spiel about trying to get an education, Ohio State, donations, how people are helping out their fellow people with it, she’s been walking around all day in this heat, etc… You know the thing where they’re trying to get me to buy magazine subscriptions. Yeah. I wish they wouldn’t knock on the door too. But alas, now somehow I need to get this lady to mosey on her little way. Frankly I’m not comfortable writing anybody a check right there on the spot at my doorway to someone I don’t even know, especially someone asking for a donation to something I can’t verify. Pardon my cynicism.

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Visual Studio .Net, oh I hate you. Let me count the ways… Seriously, though. It is pretty obvious that Visual Studio .Net was designed for designing Windows applications first and web applications were a definite afterthought. To be fair, the VS.Net IDE would be good enough for developing native applications. For web-based projects, I just do not see how anyone can stand it. I tried. Oh my goodness, I have tried. However, even when developing a web application, VS.Net uses absolute positioning for laying out everything. It is still very reminiscent of Visual Basic 5 for goodness sakes. A glance at the “HTML” source revealed a plethora of non-semantic mark up that would make the W3C drown in tears.

Backstory: I have finally finished the redesign of the web application I inherited when I moved over to the desktop software support team. Lately when anybody came to my cubicle and asked about the Software Request Form, I’d reply with “Yeah, it’s ugly.” The interface was riddled with boxes and boxes, red type, and frankly it was just ugly. To be truthful, the guy who developed it modeled the design after my own for the hardware team, but this took it to another level. The new interface is more clean, aligned, and capitalizes on the adage, “Less is more.”

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